


Flowers

by saltythumbtack



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Developing Relationship, Fluff, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Metaphors, this is very lighthearted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:40:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26270554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltythumbtack/pseuds/saltythumbtack
Summary: If Bones were to be poetic and compare relationships to a medical problem, he would compare them to burns. They’re extremely painful, require lots of care and attention to heal, and leave scars that don’t heal for years. If they’re bad enough, surgery and skin grafts will be needed to repair the damage.Just like relationships. They require constant care and attention, and sometimes, they’re so bad that the only thing that can be done is to cut them off.Poetic.
Relationships: Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Spock
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> This can be read as TOS or AOS, but I wrote it with the TOS characters in mind.

Relationships are complicated.

They’re complicated and annoying and Bones hates them.

Granted, he is probably jaded because of the divorce, but is he wrong? No. Thank you for coming to his Ted Talk.

Sometimes, he thinks that’s why he likes medicine so much. If someone’s sick, he can give them medicine and fix it. A broken bone can be set and healed, an infection can be treated, everything has a solution and if it doesn’t, then it’s because the solution hasn’t been found yet. 

If Bones were to be poetic and compare relationships to a medical problem, he would compare them to burns. They’re extremely painful, require lots of care and attention to heal, and leave scars that don’t heal for years. If they’re bad enough, surgery and skin grafts will be needed to repair the damage. 

Just like relationships. They require constant care and attention, and sometimes, they’re so bad that the only thing that can be done is to cut them off.

Poetic.

Having said all that, Bones is not a poetic man by nature, and he views relationships as a nuisance. A necessary nuisance, because he’s not a damn hermit, but a nuisance nonetheless.

There’s different kinds of relationships. If he were Spock, he would probably categorize them according to a multitude of different factors, like the ratio of romantic vs. platonic actions and undertones, the amount of daily interaction required to maintain them, and so on. But he’s not, and he couldn’t be. Bones is too emotionally charged to reduce relationships to mathematical equations. He just wishes they were a little damn easier to fix.

Surprisingly, Bones and Spock bond over not understanding relationships. Bones has too much experience; Spock, too little, and it works surprisingly well. Bones always asks why Spock doesn’t talk to Jim about it; after all, Spock is much closer to the Captain than he is to Bones, but Spock had merely shrugged and said “He-what’s the expression?-wears his heart on his sleeve.”

It makes sense. Spock has grown up being told that his emotions are shameful and something to be repressed and ignored. Bones can relate to that. He’d thrown himself into his work after his divorce, tried to ignore and bottle up his emotions, tried to convince himself that he was a hard, unfeeling person. Medicine and science weren’t emotional, and Bones didn’t have to be either.

Unfortunately, Bones _is_ emotional. He’s always up in arms about something, frustrated because someone didn’t do their job right or did something dumb or said something stupid. He’s an emotional person, but only with certain emotions. He and Spock bond over that. Bones learns that Spock really does feel strongly about things. He loves chess and science, hates the feeling of tags on his uniforms, and likes poring over Old Earth chess matches. He says it calms him, seeing all the calculations that go into the game, how much strategy there is. 

Sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly vulnerable, he admits to Bones that he misses Vulcan. 

Misses the plants on Vulcan, mostly, misses walking through the gardens and seeing the flowers that grew there. Flowers like you’ve never seen before, flowers that can’t be found anywhere else. Artificially recreated, sure, but it’s never as good as the real thing. 

Bones laughs and says that’s how he feels about peaches. The replicator can make a damn good peach, but nothing beats eating a peach on a hot day, your hands getting sticky and the juice running all over your mouth and clothes. 

“Is that not unpleasant?” Spock asks.

“Well, sure it is.” Bones replies. “But that’s part of the experience. Replicators make everything so perfect, they forget that sometimes you want to have to wash your hands after a good piece of fruit. Sometimes you want to have popcorn stuck in your teeth. Feels more…” He gestures abstractly. “Real.”

Spock nods. “The flowers on Vulcan are less perfect than the replicated ones.” He says quietly, after a long pause. “They’re...better that way.”

Bones chuckles softly. “We spent so long trying to make everything perfect that we forgot that flaws were what made things interesting.”

Spock nods slowly, considering Bones’ words. “Perhaps you have a point, Doctor.”

Their talks continue, and there’s a sort of intimacy to it that Bones finds himself looking forward to. Sitting in the quiet of Bones’ office in the medbay, there’s enough professionalism to keep them from feeling too vulnerable, but the quiet and lack of activity, especially after particularly long, hectic shifts, is comforting. 

Bones’ office begins to feel less clinical and more...homely. He finds himself poring through old botany textbooks on his lunch break, looking for interesting flowers to discuss with Spock, wondering which ones the other would like. He idly traces the illustrations and remembers with a flash of bitterness how flowers used to make him feel. They were annoying, full of bees that might sting him and pollen that would make him sneeze. He had to buy them on special occasions, or he’d get yelled at. But now that he’s got someone nice to talk about them with, he thinks he doesn’t mind flowers so much.

He might not mind buying some for Spock.

Bones starts looking for things for Spock when they’re on shore leave. Old chess books and games, logic puzzles, that sort of thing. He chalks it up to the sentimentality that comes with age, the easing of the bone-deep ache of loneliness, but he can’t deny the warmth that glows inside him when he sees Spock’s expression when Bones brings him an old Sudoku book. It’s a silly gift, and a simple one at that, but Bones gets to see Spock smile, really smile, for the first time.

Their evening meetings migrate after that, first to the mess hall, staying and talking until long after everyone has left. Bones gets the replicator to make peach cobbler and spends hours telling Spock about his grandma’s peach cobbler and the summers he spent at her house, helping her take care of her peach trees and sitting on the counter while she made the cobbler from scratch. Spock is a good listener, asks questions at the right times, even laughs at Bones’ jokes. 

Bones finds he rather likes Spock’s laugh.

In turn, Spock brings Bones to the holodeck and shyly asks the computer to “Replicate the library, please.” Immediately, a scene forms around them. Bones looks around, taking it in. The walls are a comfortably warm shade, with lots of windows and high ceilings. There are a variety of plants, even the occasional animal in a suitable large habitat, the usual assortment of tables and chairs, and books. Lots and lots of books.

“This is where I used to study, when I was still on Vulcan.” Spock says, his tone carefully measured. He circles the room slowly, fingers tracing the spines of the books. “The room had been designed over the course of many generations to be the ideal environment for study. Animals to help us relax, and to provide live examples of different physiology. The chairs were made to be comfortable enough to be in for several hours at a time without any discomfort, but not so comfortable so as to put one to sleep.” 

He pauses, and Bones can see the emotion on his face, just under the surface. Spock is upset, comforted, nostalgic, bitter, conflicted, _afraid_. Afraid because…

Because this is probably the first time he’s ever shown someone this, talked about it to another person. Who could Spock talk to about missing Vulcan that wouldn’t try to give him grief counseling or laugh at him for missing such a seemingly strict civilization? Even the library, with its calculated comfort, is an incredibly Vulcan design, and not one that the other crew members would be able to understand Spock’s nostalgia for. Hell, a couple of months ago, Bones wouldn’t have either. 

“It’s nice.” Bones says quietly. He looks around the room again, and points to a table nestled in the corner, half shrouded by a large plant. “That’d be my table, there. I loved tables like that in med school. No one can see what you’re doing. The privacy’s nice.”

Spock nods, not saying anything in return for a long moment. Their eyes meet, and Bones can see the silent thanks in Spock’s gaze, and he nods in return.

The silence stretches comfortably between them, both of them reminiscing on the finer memories of libraries, before Bones speaks again.

“What’s your favorite book, Spock?”

Spock laughs lightly. “My good doctor, I could not presume to have one! There are too many choices, with too many varied qualities for me to ever have just one. The differences in genre alone would make such a choice impossible, not to mention each author’s writing style. Then we must consider for what purpose the book was written. A book written with a powerful statement in mind cannot be compared to a book simply written to make people happy, though both have merits. It’s not just a simple matter of--” He trailed off, looking guilty. “My apologies, Doctor. I didn’t mean to go on like that.”

“No need to apologize, Spock.” Bones says, a slightly smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I was enjoying listening to you talk.”

He was.

Maybe in the past, he’d have been annoyed by Spock’s answer. He’d have said something like “Of course there’s no real way to have one favorite book, but just pick one, dammit!”, and Spock would have arched an eyebrow and said “Doctor, I would have assumed you of all people would understand the difficulty of ranking two different things. Apples and oranges, correct?” and they’d have snapped at each other all day. 

But now...the desire to snap wasn’t there. Playful banter, sure. Teasing Spock about his inability to pick just one book, like his inability to pick which peach dish Bones had shown him was his favorite, sure. But now, there was a fondness to listening to Spock talk, a fondness in knowing that he was the person Spock was choosing to ramble to. 

It was nice.

They begin taking long walks through the ship, late at night when their shifts are over and they need to wind down. Some nights, Bones rants about the patients he’d seen, and how the crew (Jim) doesn’t understand the dangers of touching unidentified things. Other nights, Spock tells Bones about the experiments he’s performed and the samples he’d collected, and Bones finds himself enjoying Spock’s company more and more.

There’s a comforting intimacy to walking around the empty halls, no one but him and Spock, nothing but the gentle hum of the engines and their quiet voices. There’s no one to see them, to whisper and joke about how they’re spending so much time together, no one doing a double-take when they see Spock laughing. 

The crew has noticed, of course, that Bones and Spock spend more time together. Some of the lower crewmen gossip about it (quietly, because Bones spread a counter-rumor that he would kill any crewmen he heard gossiping), but no one really asks them about it. 

Uhura smiles when she sees them together, happy they’ve stopped arguing and are realizing how much they have in common. Scotty doesn’t say anything, but Bones can see how his face lights up when he runs into them on one of their late-night walks. Jim wants to ask questions, so badly it becomes funny, but he keeps his distance, no doubt under threat of grievous bodily harm by Uhura if he screws this up.

Sometimes Bones wonders if they should talk about it.

But as the days pass, there becomes less and less need to talk about it. He and Spock are comfortable, happy, and that’s enough for both of them, for now. When they want more, they’ll have more. Their relationship is natural, as easy as breathing, where jokes and jibes come as quickly as whispered confessions and feather-light kisses.

If Bones were a poetic man, he would compare relationships to plants, the flowers that Spock loves so much. Delicate, imperfect, requiring great care and maintenance, but still ultimately worthwhile. Seeing a flower bloom, seeing love blossom, is the most beautiful thing Bones could’ve asked for.

Relationships are complicated, sure, and annoying at times, but Bones wouldn’t change this one for the world.

**Author's Note:**

> First Star Trek fic, I'm decently happy with how it came out. If you liked it, please consider [ buying me a coffee! ](https://ko-fi.com/cordsnake) I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
